


The Nexus

by SylverShadows



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe, Humanstuck, Multi, Science Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Swearing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-02-21
Updated: 2013-03-06
Packaged: 2017-11-30 00:31:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/693292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylverShadows/pseuds/SylverShadows
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>- Largely Still a Work In Progress -</p>
<p>Karkat woke with a bottle of nondescript pills to his right and a laptop to his left. No memory flooded his vision. He knew nothing, remember nothing, could think of nothing, but he knew that he had to move. He had to do something.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Nothing

Karkat Vantas turned twenty-four the day he woke up on the cold hard floor of an abandoned apartment. He starred up at the crumbling ceiling with zero thoughts in his head. He could imagine what he looked like and let out a small chuckle. Here he was, dressed in a suit, lying on the floor with pills of some sort spilling out of their sideways bottle off to his right. It must’ve been an odd sight if anyone had seen him.

Karkat turned to his left and saw a laptop sitting on top of a small wooden table. He tried to remember what the laptop was for, but all his brain returned was flashes of images: Him rushing up a flight of stairs followed by…somebody. He could feel the pills slipping down his throat, but then there was nothing but darkness. He couldn’t remember a thing.

Karkat rubbed his head slowly trying to work out a terrible headache as he tried to remember, but each time he sent a probe into his head it returned nothing but more pain. He resolved that maybe the laptop would tell him more and so slowly pushed himself to his feet. He was unsteady at first and nearly fell painfully face first to the floor, but steadied himself and began walking over to the laptop.

The surprising part was that not only was there his laptop, as he felt a connection to it, but a number of cords running into the wall the table was pushed up against. Those cords were plugged into the laptop and were colored as diversely as the rainbow. Karkat examine the laptop, but it looked dead. None of the cables appeared to be power cables. Karkat had a feeling whatever was on the laptop was important so he tried to remember where the power cable was but all he got back was an image of a house. He could only get a street name and number for the house before his head pushed him out as if restricting the information.

As the brutal headache returned, Karkat started to unplug the numerous plugs from the laptop and looked around confident he must’ve had a place to keep it safe. He took this time to also examine the room. It looked cozy enough, despite the fact that he knew it was in an abandoned apartment building, and the walls were covered in splash of paint here and there. One elaborate design was on the wall, opposite the table, a small cot was pushed up against. It looked like a depiction of someone who Karkat felt he knew, but couldn’t place a name to. He resolved to examine the man’s depiction, and found him wearing a crown and lounging in a throne, and so resolved to call him the King. He was drawn with brown unkempt hair that had beautiful detail. Whoever had created it was a master of their art.

Karkat checked by the cot, underneath the table, even went as far as to check the darker corners of the room not illuminated by the one large light bulb humming away on the ceiling, but Karkat found nothing to hold the laptop. He settled on carrying and was about to leave when he noticed the pills once again.

For the life of him, Karkat could not remember what purpose the pills served. He could remember what the felt like, and had a strange suscpision as to when to take one, but he could not remember their purpose. He picked up the bottle and capped what was left of the pills putting it in his right pocket feeling a something else in the same pocket. He pressed his fingers against the additional passenger before pulling it out of his pocket to find it was a small, silver external hard drive. It was no bigger than his index finger, but upon examination it was large in storage space at of one-hundred and twenty-eight gigabytes, easily larger than most drives of its size.

Karkat only spent a few seconds examining the external parts of the drive knowing that he would have to turn on the laptop before he could examine the contents of the drive. Karkat slipped the external drive back into his pocket before heading to the only door in the room. He unclicked the lock before opening the door expecting something amazing behind it, but all he got was a decaying flight of stairs.

The decay made sure Karkat was careful as he made his way down what he counted as seven levels of stairs before finding no more stairs to descend and a dilapidated door blocking his path. This door was standing half open revealing a hallway that was littered with trash and wallpaper peelings. Karkat felt almost at home in the hallway as he walked past each door towards a pair of doors at the end of the hallway which he suspected led out of the building.

Upon opening the doors Karkat wasn’t quite sure what he expected to see. He knew only that he had lost consciousness, most likely in conjunction with the pills in his pocket, and that there was one house out there that he’d seen in his memory. He couldn’t place anything beyond that. Everything he tried to remember about the world was blurred into a series of jumbled messes. With a deep breath, he pushed open the double doors and was blinded by light as he stepped out into the unknown.


	2. Chapter 2

It was hard to be surprised when you had no expectations, but Karkat would definitely call himself surprised at the ruin around him. The buildings often only reached a few stories high before crumbling down to the streets bellow creating huge piles of enormous rocks upon which blood was splatter, bodies lay, and makeshift weapons were discarded. The sky was dark and Karkat felt it was perpetually so, despite how unlikely that would. Everything around him was bleak, and he felt out of place in his suit. 

Karkat walked a few steps until he heard the sound of people yelling up ahead. It sounded as though they accompanied by a thunderstorm as the buildings all around him shook with the force of, what he assumed, must’ve been an army. He wasn’t particularly interested in staying on the streets but was reluctant to return back into the building he had exited for some reason, so he just stood there dumbstruck until he felt someone pull him sharply to his left towards one of the rubble piles. 

Karkat turned to look who was pulling him, but soon was engulfed in complete darkness as he was pulled underneath a crevice the rubble pile formed with the adjacent building. It was so dark that Karkat felt that the man leading him, as he didn’t particularly like to call that person a kidnapper, must’ve taken this path many times before. The man took a sharp left after a few steps and put pressure on both of Karkat’s shoulders signaling him to sit. Karkat did so because the man, if he meant malice, would’ve already caused him some, and he had assisted Karkat in getting away from whatever was approaching from down the road. 

The sound got louder and soon the entire room was shaking like Karkat was stuck in the middle of an earthquake. The walls vibrated and what was left of the room’s contents fell to Karkat’s feet. Once the vibration reached their pinnacle, Karkat could feel his bones shaking and he clenched his teeth and waited for the vibrations to subside. It took a few minutes but eventually Karkat was enveloped in darkness and silence once more and then it truly dawned on him that he had no idea who the man with him was. 

“That was close,” Karkat heard the guy say with a sigh of relief. Karkat didn’t respond but just starred at the point from which the sound emanated as if he could discern the speaker’s looks just from his voice. Karkat waited for a few seconds until suddenly he went blind as light exploded into the room. Karkat covered his eyes and waited for his eyes to adjust to the light, and only when they did, Karkat lowered his hands. 

Standing in front of Karkat was a guy, not much older than Karkat himself, dressed in all black combat armor. He was wearing a cape with a black outside and a red inside, and on his back was a nasty looking rifle of some form. Karkat just starred at the weapon for a few seconds, very confused. Nothing he could remember looked as sleek as the rifle on the man’s back. Where was he?

“Hey,” the guy said in front of him said, “Do you speak?”

“Of course I speak!” Karkat responded fiercely to the, what he perceived as, dumb question, “I’m Karkat? Do you have a name?”

“It’s Dave,” The man said as he began walking towards the exit back onto the street. Karkat starred at Dave who was walking away. Karkat couldn’t decide if he should follow. He had no idea who this man was, he was lost in a world he didn’t understand, and, on top of that, he couldn’t remember more than, at most, an hour ago. 

“You coming?” Dave asked as he reached the exit. Karkat hesitated for a few seconds and then sprinted after Dave. Once Karkat had caught up the two walked in stride back out onto the streets. Karkat took a few seconds to reacquaint himself with the brutal scene. 

“Would it be weird if I told you I don’t remember this world at all?” Karkat asked spontaneously, trying to get some answers without really presenting too much of his own history.

“No.” Dave responds simply as the two walk together through rows of crumbling buildings and rubble, “You wouldn’t be the first. A lot of us don’t remember much of anything when we first came here. We just knew that here wasn’t there… where ever there is.”

Dave’s comment silenced Karkat as the two walked and suddenly a change occurred and the rubble piles got smaller and more people appeared on the streets. They all looked so hopeless, much the buildings surrounding Karkat. They didn’t meet either Karkat’s or Dave’s eyes as the two walked past. Some of the people looked like they were knocking on death’s door.

“Does this place, ‘here’, have a name,” Karkat asked trying to break the silence that had gone on for a few minutes. Dave didn’t respond but just starred up at the still dark sky as if the answer to Karkat’s question lied with the stars above. 

“No one really has given it a name because so many of us hope it’s just a stop on the track. You’ll come to understand soon,” Dave responded and they walked a few more steps before he added, “But most of us just call it hell.”


	3. Chapter 3

Karkat stopped right in his track. Hell? The place looked bleak but what could earn it such a brutal nickname? Karkat, in his momentary paused, remembered the laptop he was carrying. He had been clutching it so tight that his fingers were white, and yet he had forgotten it as though it had become a part of him. Dave, confused as to why Karkat had stopped turned towards Karkat and began to open his mouth when he noticed Karkat starring at the laptop.

Dave had seen the laptop but thought nothing queer about Karkat’s possession of it. Even the lower classes have electronics, but Karkat certainly didn’t look lower class now that Dave sized him up. In fact, in the suit Karkat was wearing, he appeared to be of the upper class, maybe even associated with The King himself, but Dave doubted that. Karkat didn’t give off the same air that one of those assholes who worked for the King did, and he should know, his brother was one of them. 

“Is that laptop yours?” Dave asked knowing how dumb of a question it was, and he wasn’t surprised when the immediate response was, “Mine. Who else’s could it fucking be?”

Dave wasn’t too taken aback by the response and took it in stride as a way to inquire more about the laptop, “Let me rephrase my question, what purpose do you have for that laptop?”

Karkat pondered the question as though it were a physical entity. He took the question in his mind’s hands and flipped it around trying to pry at Dave’s motives and understand why he would be intrigued by the laptop. Karkat, hesitantly, responded to Dave’s question by saying, “I’d like to know myself. All I know is whatever is on it is important, but it’s dead and I can’t quite remember where the charger is. I can’t remember much for that matter.”

Dave was silent for a few seconds before he said, “Well, I know someone back at The Hive who might be able to help you with that.”

Karkat knew that the statement was more of a question of Karkat’s intentions and motives. This was a trial of sorts. Karkat knew that Dave had some ulterior motive to get Karkat to what he called ‘The Hive’ and was tempting Karkat with the promise of discovering what was on the laptop which may or may not be important at all. Karkat looked down at the laptop one more time before looking back at Dave and saying, “Okay, I’ll bite. Show me this ‘Hive.’”

Dave smiled slightly before saying happily, “We’re on top of it. You could walk forty blocks and you could be on top of it. It’s the rundown subways under us.”

Karkat was confused as to why Dave said this so quickly and with such willingness to reveal something, Karkat guessed, was supposed to be kept secret. It was only when the flare was fired up in the air above them, turning Dave into a silhouette, that Karkat garnered that Dave had led Karkat into an ambush of his friends. 

These friends slowly revealed themselves. Some of them began descending from rooftops where they had been carefully watching and observing, while others just sauntered out of the nearby apartments and began walking up to Dave and congratulating him on something or another. He looked to be almost a god among these people. Karkat noticed a man standing a little further away than the rest who wore a more disapproving grin that was similar to the lack of emotion on Karkat’s face.

The man was dressed in an odd mix of armor, similar to what Dave was wearing, and comfortable clothing such as jeans and t-shirt. His eyes watched Karkat as though he expected Karkat to sprout wings any second. Or just expecting Karkat to call in ‘The King’ whoever that was. The man, after a few seconds, spun with a flourish and began walking away at which point Karkat noticed a sniper rifle on his back and a sword diagonally in the opposite direction. The man descended down a manhole unlike the others who were going down a subway entrance. 

“Yo, Karkat. You coming?” Dave called out to Karkat who sprinted after him but felt like a useless addition to the huge group surrounding Dave. The mass of people descended into the subway system and made a number of turns that Karkat was sure he couldn’t repeat until they reached one of the most stunning things Karkat had ever seen. 

It was a cavern. No word described the hollowed out pit bellow the city better. Karkat guessed it had to stretch on for at least a mile with a number of additional pathways leading out of the man cavern and also little niches in the wall. The whole place resembled the structure it was named for: Hive. 

After they entered the Hive, the crowd around Dave began to disperse until it was just Dave and a skinny girl in faded blue jeans and a black hoodie with a yellow sun on it. Karkat waited for the two to include them in their conversation which came when the girl turned and asked, “What’s your name?”

“I’m Karkat,” Karkat responded kindly then, trying to be agreeable, asked, “And what’s your name?”

“I’m Rose. I’m Dave’s younger sister,” she responded holding out a hand, which Karkat shook happily. She stood with a stature of one who had gone through the gauntlet, who had been tested many times and passed with flying colors. 

“Hey Rose be a friend,” Dave said, “Show Karkat around. Get him to Sollux’s place by six or so, I’m going to go try and find John.”

Rose didn’t respond as Dave was already half way down a pair of stairs built into the wall of the Hive. Rose just stood a little aloof from Karkat and the two sized each other up. They seemed, simply by dress, like polar opposites.

“Well this is the Hive,” Rose said with a mock flourish of her arm and then adding a heavy tone of sarcasm, “It’s like the five star hotel of the future.”

Rose, with little consultation with Karkat, began walking off in a direction with long purposeful strides similar to her brother’s. Karkat, once again struggled to keep up with her pace. Rose was rambling on constantly about here or there. Rose talked of how this was the center of the resistance, but the King didn’t dare assault them here directly, but she declined Karkat’s question as to why. In fact, she generally ignored most of Karkat’s questions which were as wide as the Hive its self. 

Rose went on for what felt like hours to Karkat and he began to get tired of her constant drone, but didn’t voice himself. Internally he was screaming for her to shut up, but she, and her brother, were kind enough to put up with him despite his apparent lack of knowledge. Rose was walking along the main floor leading Karkat down one of the passageways she said led to Sollux’s, whoever that was, place. It was when they were standing outside the door that Karkat watched Rose snap for the first time. 

It was somewhat random Rose had just been saying something regarding how the resistance had been fighting for as long as anyone could remember when she suddenly threw a hand on her left temple and begun swaying in place. Karkat quickly set the laptop down and went to steady her when she let out an ear piercing scream before collapsing into Karkat’s arms. He didn’t know what to do but knock on the door in hopes he hadn’t done something wrong, he didn’t even know if she was okay.


End file.
